Wu Chi-Tsung

Wu Chi-Tsung

Wire I

Wu Chi-Tsung is fascinated by images, how they are made and how we see them. His works to date have mostly involved photography and video and the processes which are needed to create images. He experiments with and manipulates these processes, exploiting the alchemy inherent in chemical photography or changing the elements of timing which makes film the medium of movement.

There is a sense of irony behind his work – that a Taiwanese artist should be preoccupied by such traditional methods of creating images. Living in a highly sophisticated technological world Wu Chi-Tsung takes delight in almost accidentally finding ways to capture or re-imagine the world around him. All his works, whether presented as still or moving images, use time as an integral part of their make-up, not simply through the convention of a shutter opening and closing but through the subversion of time in how the images were made. On occasion he consciously decides to destroy the original negative film to confirm the irreversibility of time and the inability to reproduce a moment or a scene. As a result he often makes images which in their mood seem to owe something to picture making of the past.

In AD 75, the Romans built a fortress at Caerleon that would guard the region for over 200 years. Today at the National Roman Legion Museum you can learn what made the Romans a formidable force and how life wouldn't be the same without them.